Black Lab Linux is a custom Linux distribution that focuses on bringing stability to desktop Linux. This system provides high performance and enhanced multimedia capabilities to home, business, and professional desktop Linux users.

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Donations

If you just want to donate to the project without purchasing any product you can donate here.

Your donations will be used for the following purposes

Finance the distribution

Pay for things like website maintenance

Purchase Equipment

Fund the work of developers

Why donate? Black Lab Linux is free of cost to download and funding is necessary to keep Black Lab Linux free to download as well as aid in costs of maintaining a distribution

How much should I donate? Anything you want to donate, the amount doesnt matter.

Friday, December 7, 2012

E-Mail Questions Answered #2

This will become a regular segment where we will take customers and user questions and answer them here. So lets go ahead and get started

Why did OS4 start going with the BeOS look that it used in PC/OS. Isnt this a step backwards? Are you guys now competing with ZevenOS and Haiku?

No. The "BeOS " look has always been included in PC/OS and OS4 and was once used as our default. We went back to using them as a team decision and hey they look great on the current theme. Do we compete with Haiku and ZevenOS? No. Both those projects trend towards legacy BeOS users, and the more bleeding edge side of the spectrum. We trend towards the more stable, LTS side of the spectrum and the commercial side of the spectrum. Both are fine projects and if the oppurtunity ever opens for us to work together, we would.

Would you mind if I forked OS4 for a specific commercial endeavor?

We are not at all turned off by forks of OS4. While I would be more than happy to help you with your needs sometimes forks are necessary for terms of hardware support and other differences where it wouldnt make sense to include it in the main releases and hey, they help legitimize OS4 as a major player in the Linux community

A simple advice; don't comment on other people's distros on their web sites and say dirty things there. If you don't stop it, I'd fork your distro, make it better and give it free. This OS4 is an absolute nonsense! You want money for that? come on!

First part of your statement, nobody from PC/OpenSystems LLC or the OS4 team goes around bashing anyone elses distro. Its never been done by anyone on my team and it will never be allowed. If you have any suggestions on the development of OS4 to make it better please do enlighten us with your coding prowess. but with over 26,000 users I think we are doing a fine job. Towards the second part of your statement, OS4 has been and always will be downloadable from the internet for FREE. When you purchase a USB key for OS4 you are getting support, saving your own bandwidth or if you are in an area where bandwidth is metered you can acquire OS4 on a USB key, you are paying for labor and convenience. Like I said in the previous question. You can go ahead and fork it if you wish, you will just help legitimize us as a major player in the Linux community. If you wish to discuss the nonsense part further drop me an e-mail, if you cant commit to polite, productive dialog I urge you to go away.

When will you release an updated systems list for preinstalled OS4?

After the new year. Right now we are still in talks with OEM's

Have you tried Windows 8?

Yes, Windows 8 is a step forward in some areas a step backwards in some.

Can OS4 run in in enlightened mode on Microsoft HyperV?

Yes, the enlightened mode drivers are included in OS4 by default.

When will 13.2 and 14 be available?

13.2 will be released the end of January, an OS4 14 release date hasnt been committed on yet.

Will the KDE version be updated?

Yes, we have some partners that work on the KDE version as its only released in Europe and Asia. We look forward to seeing their work.

Will you guys ever release a GNOME 3 or Unity version of OS4?

No. GNOME3 and Unity are downloadable but we are fully committed to XFCE and it remains our default desktop on OpenDesktop and OpenServer

These lists are heavily moderated so your communication may not show up immediately.

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Use of non-free software

The goal of the Black Lab Linux project is to provide software that fits within the guidelines of free and opensource software. We also are a consumer distribution and realize that convenience and support of all different devices and codecs are necessary. So with that we do provide software that is not governed by a free and open source license in our repositories and as part of the main distribution. So what does this mean exactly? It means that software and hardware vendors do provide us with precompiled object code or blobs vs making their source code available. While this does not introduce any kind of legal or system stability risk to the users. Those who request to live life by adhering to the Free Software Foundations policies will not be happy using Black Lab Linux. We believe users should be able to use their computer or devices any way that they wish too. This means running programs to watch videos, music and consuming ebooks in anyway that they wish.

Cluster Maps

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www4.clustrmaps.com/user/2ba107099"&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://www4.clustrmaps.com/stats/maps-no_clusters/www.os4online.com-thumb.jpg" alt="Locations of visitors to this page" /&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;